Dumb Luck

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT DUMB LUCK - PAGE 5

When the 2010 census tallies are complete, they will likely reveal that Chicago has lost population again, as it has in every census since 1950. (If not, then credit for the gain — or stability — will be due to the influx of Hispanic immigrants.) What is remarkable is that Chicago hasn't lost even more population. In part, it's a testament to our attracting and retaining hardy souls. But more likely, credit should be given to the reinvention and transformation of Chicago from an industrial center and shipping point to a financial mecca with a heavy influx of diversified businesses.

Dear Ann Landers: I had to write about your response to "Resigned in River City." She said her marriage of 17 years was perfect except for sex. If she didn't give "Rod" sex at least three times a week, she got "The Treatment," which consisted of cold and formal politeness in private and barbed sarcasm in public. So, now she gives him what he wants, but inside, she's dead sexually. You focused on her last paragraph, where she said Rod wishes he could excite her the way she excites him. You indicated this meant he was open to suggestion and advised seeing a sex counselor.

When I advocated in the Tribune last month for a year without professional football, the bottom of my essay included a brief description of my daily duties at this newspaper: “Josh Noel is the Tribune's Travel and beer writer.” Many readers called me a lunatic for wishing ill upon the NFL or applauded seeing past our nation's most fevered Sunday ritual. But a few folks were struck by something else. “How in the hell do you get the title of travel and beer writer?” one man wrote.

We here at Silicon Prairie aren't professional market researchers, but we do like to know what's happening in the world of corporate computing before we read about it elsewhere. So we've assembled a small, knowledgeable and more than a little cantankerous group of programmers, engineers, developers and managers to whom we talk regularly for insight into what's happening on corporate desktops and hidden inside corporate networks. One trend we're noticing is a change in the way companies are upgrading their Internet browsers.

It had the feel of playoff football, the look of it, too. Cautious, handcart football. Weather with an edge. The stakes were obvious stakes, in this case first place in the Afterthought Division. The opponents, likewise, have not seen the last of one another, and if the Lions learned anything in losing to the Bears in real man's weather Sunday, it was that they cannot suddenly go delicate after muscling their way in front. Or to, after daring that lateral delight, Barry Sanders, to do everything well in the first half, ignore him altogether in the second.

Each year about this time, several boxelder bugs gather in my work space, apparently looking for compatible company, if not guidance to get through the approaching winter. On a recent afternoon, as they lounged on the sun-drenched windowsill, the following is what they heard: My friends, we are gathered here once again in this season of transition, summer in a shambles at our feet and winter cracking its knuckles just over the hill. We are here only by dint of dumb luck since any one of us could have been annihilated in traffic or done in by a picnic hamper.

Brendan Fraser has carved himself an enviable career in Hollywood over the last few years by carefully choosing a diverse range of roles and projects. So what attracted the star, hot off "The Mummy," "Gods and Monsters" and "George of the Jungle," to jump at the chance to play the title character in "Dudley Do-Right," the live-action version of the classic Jay Ward cartoon series that opens Friday? "Oh, simple," explains the Canadian actor. "For a start, he's derring-do, he's a bit befuddled, he means well and, of course, he still rides his horse backward.

Aside, of course, from a complete disregard for good taste in architecture, Medinah is typical of the annual torture inflicted upon fools trying to win the U.S. Open. It has shaggy rough, quick greens, fluffy bunkers, narrowed fairways and, for its special signature, a conspicuous redundancy of trees. "About 100 million trees," said Mark Calcavecchia, who is working from memory. Even if it is missing the quiet dignity in clubhouses usually favored by the pale guardians of the national golf championship, Medinah will serve its third turn as Torquemada to the Tour.

By Bill Stokes. and Bill Stokes is a Tribune reporter | September 11, 1993

It was the summer of our malcontent. We did not make the big news this summer; rivers did, rivers that rose up out of artificial beds to reclaim their turf and to reassert the omnipotence of natural cycles. We could only watch and wait, blindly ambitious to preserve our little ridges of bottom-land tinkering, like ants bearing grains of sand and hesitating before the onslaught of garden hoses. And amid the watching and waiting, water came creeping up out of valleys and swamps and across backyards and down streets.

By Reviewed by Joseph Coates, Tribune book critic | September 30, 1990

Historical Fictions By Hugh Kenner North Point, 338 pages, $24.95 Awed for the second time in two years by a collection of Hugh Kenner's critical essays ("Mazes" appeared in 1989), I began to wonder why it hasn`t been noticed that Kenner, purely on the basis of breadth of knowledge and interests, would be the obvious choice to succeed the late great critic Edmund Wilson. But the question almost answers itself: the man knows too much. Kenner knows first of all that the culture has shifted too radically away from print in the postwar years to allow any single critic to have the authority Wilson wielded.